Monitoring food and health news -- with particular attention to fads, fallacies and the "obesity" war

Summary of findings to date: Everything you can possibly eat or drink is both bad and good for you

"Let me have men about me that are fat... Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look ... such men are dangerous." -- Shakespeare

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Warning: capitalism can damage your health

Deaths rose sharply in communist countries that rushed to privatise. Does that prove economic `shock therapy' kills? Or was it that the statistics rapidly became more honest in such countries? You would have to be naive to believe Communist statistics and old habits die hard

For a communist nation wishing to show off its capitalist credentials, mass privatisation was a killer move. Literally. In Russia, when the sell-off of state-owned companies was at its height, the death rate of working adults rose by 18 per cent and the life expectancy dropped by nearly five years. Men of working age, suddenly bereft of both employment and the healthcare that frequently accompanies it, found themselves greeting the Grim Reaper well ahead of schedule, sometimes having downed a bottle or two of aftershave.

This is, in caricature, the controversial thesis offered by David Stuckler, Lawrence King and Martin McKee, in The Lancet recently. The scientists - Dr Stuckler and Dr King are sociologists at Oxford and Cambridge respectively, and McKee is Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine - claim that hasty mass privatisation in several former Eastern bloc and Soviet states coincides convincingly with a spike in their death rates. They speculate the main link between the two is unemployment, a well established cause of ill health and stress, as well as a trigger for life-shortening behaviour, such as binge drinking.

The study has ignited an intriguing, and sometimes ill-tempered, debate about how swiftly - or slowly - a fledgeling economy should emerge from its chrysalis. In their analysis, the researchers gently wag a finger at Jeffrey Sachs, the world-famous economist and advocate of "shock therapy" - the sudden lifting of price controls and subsidies, coupled with the flogging off of state companies and assets - to catapult countries irreversibly into capitalism. "The need to accelerate privatisation is the paramount economic policy issue facing Eastern Europe," the economist once wrote.

Unsurprisingly, Professor Sachs is none too keen to have up to a million communist corpses piled at his door. He counters that the link between privatisation and deaths is "zero"; that a rise in dangerous drinking among Russians was due not to unemployment but to the abandonment of an anti-alcohol campaign; and that the notoriously poor Soviet diet must bear some blame. It's a peculiar choice, that last one, for the cerebral professor: short of adulteration with poison, diet cannot explain sudden changes in death rates.

As well as pointing this out, the academics retort that "the countries Professor Sachs cites as successes (in terms of their transition to free-market economies) were only successful because they did not follow his advice".

It's not so much velvet glove, this spat, as boxing glove, and it looks like going the full ten rounds. At the very least, we should admit the possibility that shock therapy has hit the ropes. and why it matters. Because China and India are poised to sell off many of their state-owned enterprises in the hope of ascending to the top of the economic heap. Stop and think about it. Two of the most populous nations on earth are heading down the path of capitalism, and there is half-decent evidence that the way this path is travelled could spell the difference between life and death for millions.

Dr Stuckler and Professor McKee say their paper is about epidemiology, not ideology. Their aim was to peer deeper into the high human price paid for the death of communism in Europe, a fact that is not in dispute. Unicef estimates it caused three million premature deaths. The United Nations calculates that ten million men disappeared during the transition. Life expectancy dropped in many affected countries (for Russian men, who especially suffered, it fell from 64 to 58 between 1991 and 1994). Unemployment and hazardous drinking (including the consumption of spirits and even aftershave) were found to be serious factors.

But why did some countries, such as Russia and Kazakhstan, suffer steeper rises in their death rate than other countries going through similar turmoil, such as Slovenia? Dr Stuckler et al decided to try to put numbers and a timeline to a hunch: that the way market reforms were carried out might be the key. As the authors summarise: "Any disruption to the established social order creates high levels of social stress." Anecdotally, the countries that sprinted to capitalism appeared to suffer most; those that cantered emerged relatively unscathed.

They defined "mass privatisation" as the transfer of at least 25 per cent of large, state-owned enterprises to the private sector within two years. On average, the countries with mass privatisation programmes saw the death rate for adult men (aged between 15 and 59) rise by 13 per cent; in total, it represented nearly a million extra deaths. Across the five worst countries, which included Russia and Kazakhstan, the average death rate shot up by 42 per cent for a short period in the early nineties.

Other countries, such as Croatia and Slovenia, which dismantled the machinery of communism more slowly, did not see such a dramatic rise. Also, those countries where people belonged to social networks such as the Church, or trade unions were less badly affected; interestingly, it is this aspect that the authors regard as their key breakthrough.

"The Poles came out well (from communism)," Professor McKee told me. "Why? Because they meet each other at Mass every Sunday."

The authors speculate that those countries undergoing shock therapy unwittingly swept safety nets away with the old order. Many Russians lived in "one-company towns"; when the companies and jobs disappeared, so did healthcare, childcare and the social hub.

The Economist has lambasted the paper and the research has provoked a torrent of invective in the blogosphere. But what should matter more is whether the paper represents decent science; here, we must note the opinion of Professor Sir Michael Marmot, perhaps the biggest name in the field of how social circumstances affect health: "With all the caveats, Stuckler and colleagues' study is relevant beyond Eastern Europe..."

The paper has been wrongly viewed by outsiders as an ideologically motivated attack on capitalism; its authors have fallen victim to an occupational hazard of social science. "We are not stark raving Leninists," sighs Professor McKee, who confesses to being flabbergasted at the critics. Of course capitalism is a good thing, he says, but we should pursue it with human welfare - as well as political and economic considerations - in mind. Privatising at a prudent pace, while ensuring the jobless have social support, is the ideal scenario.

China and India are embracing free markets. China alone has a population of 1.4 billion, roughly ten times that of Russia. If there is an inkling of truth in the analysis, then "shock therapy" could jeopardise tens of millions of lives. And there's nothing therapeutic about that.

The `vaccine court' in the United States, and its excellent expert witnesses, have finally slain and buried MMR junk science.

`To conclude that Colten's condition was the result of his MMR vaccine, an objective observer would have to emulate Lewis Carroll's White Queen and be able to believe six impossible (or, at least, highly improbable) things before breakfast. The families of children with autistic spectrum disorders have waited in vain for adequate evidence to support the autism-MMR hypothesis. Although I have the deepest sympathy for families like Colten's, struggling emotionally and financially to find answers about ASD's [Autistic Spectrum Disorders] causes, and reliable therapies to treat ASD's symptoms, I must decide Colten's case on the evidence before me. That evidence does not establish an adequate factual basis from which to conclude that Colten's condition was caused by his vaccines.'

`I feel a deep sympathy and admiration for the Cedillo family. And I have no doubt that the families of countless other autistic children, families that cope every day with the tremendous challenges of caring for autistic children, are similarly deserving of sympathy and admiration. However, I must decide this case not on sentiment, but by analysing the evidence. Congress designed the [vaccine injury compensation] programme to compensate only families of those individuals whose injuries or deaths can be linked causally. to a listed vaccination. In this case the evidence advanced by the petitioners has fallen far short of demonstrating such a link.'

George L Hastings, 12 February 2009, Special Master, US Court of Federal Claims. Petitioners: Theresa and Michael Cedillo (parents of Michelle). Respondent: Secretary of Health and Human Services

`The Hazlehursts' experience as parents of an autistic child, as described during the evidentiary hearing in this case, has been a very difficult one. The undersigned is moved as a person and as a parent by the Hazlehursts' account and again extends to the Hazlehursts very sincere sympathy for the challenges they face with Yates. The undersigned's charge, however, does not permit decision-making on the basis of sentiment but rather requires a careful legal analysis of the evidence.

`The parties have submitted a wealth of evidence and have presented the testimony of a number of experts who have extensive clinical and research experience in the particular areas of interest in this case. Having carefully and fully considered the evidence, the undersigned concludes that the combination of the thimerosal-containing vaccines and the MMR vaccine are not causal factors in the development of autism. The weight of the presented evidence that is scientifically reliable and methodologically sound does not support petitioners' claim. Petitioners have failed to establish entitlement to compensation under the Vaccine Act.'

Patricia E Campbell-Smith, 12 February 2009, Special Master, US Court of Federal Claims. Petitioners: Rolf and Angela Hazlehurst (parents of William Yates). Respondent: Secretary of Health and Human Services

In 2007 federal judges were appointed as `special masters' in three test cases selected from the families of more than 5,000 children claiming compensation on the grounds that a combination of vaccines containing the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in the first year of life and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine after 12 months, caused them to develop autism and related health problems.

The first case in the `Omnibus Autism Proceedings' - that of Michelle Cedillo - was heard by George L Hastings in Washington, DC in June 2007; the second - that of William Yates Hazlehurst - by Patricia E Campbell-Smith in Charlotte, North Carolina in October 2007; the third - that of Colten Snyder - by Denise K Vowell in Orlando, Florida in November 2007. On 12 February, in simultaneously published judgments, all three judges rejected claims that vaccines caused autism in these children (1).

The special masters' concluding summaries, quoted above, are sympathetic, judicious and categorical. The full judgments, amounting to nearly 700 pages of text, are of exceptional interest to anybody concerned to establish the truth in this long-running controversy.

A tribute to American justice

Andrew Wakefield, the former Royal Free Hospital researcher who launched the MMR-autism scare more than a decade ago, and is now based in a private autism treatment clinic in Texas, told a local TV station last week that he believes that this issue `can't be resolved in the courts of law' (2). In general, I am inclined to agree with Dr Wakefield that law courts are not the best places in which to deal with matters of controversy in science. Yet, on the particular issues at stake in the `Omnibus Autism Proceedings', the legal forum offers some advantages.

Though assemblies set up to evaluate claims of vaccine-autism links, by the Medical Research Council in the UK, or the Institute of Medicine in the USA, have sought to involve parents and other lay interests, the terms of discussion have generally been set by scientists and medical authorities. By contrast, the expert witnesses in the vaccine courts are obliged to present their evidence to judges who have no particular scientific expertise: the standard is that of the intelligent, objective, observer.

Parents who attribute their children's autism to vaccines often claim that they - and the scientists and doctors who support their conviction - have been denied a public hearing. The vaccine courts allowed their voices, and those of their legal representatives and supportive experts, to be heard and to be interrogated. The scientific issues, though complex, can be resolved in these cases into a basic question that can be decided by a competent judge: does the evidence support the claim that this vaccine (or combination of vaccines) caused autism in this child? It is also worth recalling the precedent of the exemplary judgment made in relation to claims against the whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine in England more than 20 years ago (3).

In each of the three test cases, the special masters heard statements from lawyers for the petitioners (the children's families) and from those representing the respondent (the US health department). They heard evidence from the parents and from expert witnesses called by the parents and those called by the health authorities; witnesses were subjected to cross examination by rival lawyers. The special masters reviewed documents submitted by both sides, including scientific papers and medical reports relating to the three children. They carefully and conscientiously evaluated the evidence and, by a process documented in detail in the judgments, came to their conclusions. By contrast with the proceedings currently underway at the General Medical Council in London, the US vaccine courts offer a process that is transparent, democratic and scrupulously fair and efficient, a tribute to the superiority of the American legal system (4).

A number of aspects of the vaccine court's judgments merit further discussion. The first is the most important, but also the most familiar - the scientific issue of whether vaccines cause autism. The second is the questions raised by the court about the quality of the scientific and medical advice received by the petitioners, and, implicitly, by parents of autistic children more widely who identify with the anti-vaccine and associated biomedical treatment campaigns. The court also raised serious concerns about the activities of three key figures in this controversy - Andrew Wakefield (who did not appear in person but whose work was extensively discussed), the paediatric gastroenterologist Arthur Krigsman and the general practitioner Jeffrey Bradstreet. Both Krigsman and Bradstreet are close collaborators with Wakefield and both appeared in these test cases as expert witnesses and consulting physicians. Both are prominent figures in the Defeat Autism Now! network of practitioners who provide `unorthodox biomedical interventions' for children with autism.

`Bad science'

`Doctor Fombonne summed up the body of scientific research into ASD's [autistic spectrum disorders] causes and the petitioners' TCV-MMR vaccine hypothesis, saying the possibility that some children are genetically predisposed to abnormal reactions to TCVs [thimerosal-containing vaccines] and the MMR vaccine so as to cause autism was less likely than the possibility of the earth being the center of the solar system. His statement is an exaggeration of the evidence (or lack thereof), but is a concise and pithy expression of the general scientific disapproval of petitioners' theories.' (5)

`Sadly, the petitioners in this litigation have been the victims of bad science, conducted to support litigation rather than to advance medical and scientific understanding of ASD'. (6)

We need not dwell here on the scientific basis of claims that autism may be caused by mercury or MMR vaccines: for a comprehensive review see my new book and Paul Offit's account (7). Let us simply present the conclusions drawn by special master Denise Vowell in the Colten Snyder case (which are similar to those in the other cases). `After careful consideration of all of the evidence', Vowell found that `it was abundantly clear that petitioners' theories of causation were speculative and unpersuasive' (8). In particular, petitioners:

a) `could not reliably demonstrate the presence of measles virus in Colten's central nervous system' (this was `because of pervasive quality control problems at a now-defunct laboratory' - of which more below);

b) `failed to establish that measles virus can cause autism or that it did so in Colten';

c) `failed to demonstrate that amount of ethylmercury in TCVs [thimerosal-containing vaccines] causes immune system suppression or dysregulation';

d) `failed to show that Colten's immune system was dysregulated'.

Vowell also dismissed the concept of `autistic enterocolitis', an inflammatory bowel condition that provides a hypothetical link between MMR and autism, as `speculative and unsupported by the weight of evidence' (9).

Bad scientists

`Respondents' experts were far more qualified, better supported by the weight of scientific research and authority, and simply more persuasive on nearly every point in contention.' (10)

The gulf in relevant expertise and experience between the rival expert witnesses is a recurring theme in the vaccine court judgments. The special masters exposed several instances of `resume padding' among the parents' experts and of illegitimate claims to academic status and authorship of published papers. They noted that one of these experts had become a professional expert witness after retiring from clinical practice 17 years ago. By contrast, the experts challenging vaccine-autism links were highly qualified and highly experienced in the relevant disciplines.

While noting their concerns about the parents' experts' CVs, the special masters emphasised that their judgment was not merely based on the experts' academic authority, but also on their performances in court. All three commented that whereas they found the respondent's witnesses in general to be knowledgeable, well-informed and credible, the parents' experts tended to be ineffectual and unpersuasive. Special master Patricia Campbell-Smith, who presided in the Hazlehurst case, emphasised that the respondent's witnesses were more persuasive because their evidence was `well supported by medical literature and significant clinical experience' (11). She observed that they were `careful in matters of degree', that they offered `specific, detailed criticisms' of rival evidence `explaining carefully' why they considered it was not reliable. By contrast, petitioners' witnesses were `not as disciplined. where differences mattered'. When it came to the interpretation of scientific papers, they gave `greater weight to speculative conclusions' than even the authors of these papers, they used `carefully selected sentences' taken out of context and relied on `scientifically flawed and unreliable articles'.

Take, for example, the contrast between Jean Ronel-Corbier, a paediatric neurologist who treats autistic children, but has no record of academic publications or professional distinction, and Diane Griffin, a virologist with a long record of publication and an international reputation. Both, like most of the expert witnesses, appeared in all three cases. Vowell found Ronel-Corbier to be `earnest and sincere' but considered that his opinions were `heavily laced with generalities, speculation and beliefs largely unsupported by evidence' (12). Hastings agreed that he was `sincere but not reliable'; he appeared `unfamiliar with the medical literature' and was `willing to give opinions on causation on very scant evidence' (13). Vowell found that Griffin was, `despite her inexperience' in court, a `model witness' whose testimony was `careful, reasoned and responsive' (14). She offered `appropriately qualified opinions' and as a result was `compelling and completely convincing'. Campbell-Smith considered Griffin `highly credible and knowledgeable'.

The gulf in academic and professional standards between the rival experts in these cases is not the result of the petitioners' difficulty in persuading high quality scientists and doctors to testify on their behalf. It reflects the fact that the bad science of the vaccine-autism campaign is not supported by reputable scientists and doctors in the relevant disciplines. It is a great misfortune that, over the past decade, thousands of parents of autistic children, on both sides of the Atlantic, have come under the influence of the plausible purveyors of the junk science of the vaccine-autism campaign (15). The great value of the Omnibus Autism Proceedings has been in exposing the work of these shady practitioners to the scrutiny of serious scientists.....

Where it is not bunk is when it shows that some treatment or influence has no effect on lifespan or disease incidence. It is as convincing as disproof as it is unconvincing as proof. Think about it. As Einstein said: No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Epidemiological studies are useful for hypothesis-generating or for hypothesis-testing of theories already examined in experimental work but they do not enable causative inferences by themselves

The standard of reasoning that one commonly finds in epidemiological journal articles is akin to the following false syllogism:
Chairs have legs
You have legs
So therefore you are a chair

I am rather in despair that important medical research is plagued by arrant nonsense. The simple truth that correlation is not causation seems unknown to most medical writers. As a last ditch attempt to get that truth into a few more skulls let me be "offensive". Offensiveness may serve to get the matter noticed. So here is the story: There is about a -.5 correlation between lip size and IQ. Big lips predict low IQ. Your run-of-the mill medical researcher will pounce on that as a huge breakthrough in finding the causes of IQ -- and propound new theories about things such as blood circulation to explain how lips affect IQ. But that is nonsense. Big lips are mostly found on people of African ancestry and, as all the studies attest, Africans are a very low IQ group. The correlation arises because of heredity, not lip size. There is a third factor behind the correlation -- and the possibility of such third factors seems to be a jaw-dropping surprise to most medical researchers

SALT -- SALT -- SALT

1). A good example of an epidemiological disproof concerns the dreaded salt (NaCl). We are constantly told that we eat too much salt for good health and must cut back our consumption of it. Yet there is one nation that consumes huge amounts of salt. So do they all die young there? Quite the reverse: Japan has the world's highest concentration of centenarians. Taste Japan's favourite sauce -- soy sauce -- if you want to understand Japanese salt consumption. It's almost solid salt.

2). We need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. So the conventional wisdom is not only wrong. It is positively harmful

3). Table salt is a major source of iodine, which is why salt is normally "iodized" by official decree. Cutting back salt consumption runs the risk of iodine deficiency, with its huge adverse health impacts -- goiter, mental retardation etc. GIVE YOUR BABY PLENTY OF SALTY FOODS -- unless you want to turn it into a cretin

4). Our blood has roughly the same concentration of salt as sea-water so claims that the body cannot handle high levels of salt were always absurd

5). The latest academic study shows that LOW salt in your blood is most likely to lead to heart attacks. See JAMA. 2011;305(17):1777-1785. More here and here and here for similar findings. Salt is harmless but a deficiency of it is not. We need it. See also here

PEANUTS: There is a vaccination against peanut allergy -- peanuts themselves. Give peanut products (e.g. peanut butter -- or the original "Bamba" if you have Israeli contacts) to your baby as soon as it begins to take solid foods and that should immunize it for life. See here and here (scroll down). It's also likely that a mother who eats peanuts while she is lactating may confer some protection on her baby. See here

THE SIDE-EFFECT MANIA. If a drug is shown to have troublesome side-effects, there are always calls for it to be banned or not authorized for use in the first place. But that is insane. ALL drugs have side effects. Even aspirin causes stomach bleeding, for instance -- and paracetamol (acetaminophen) can wreck your liver. If a drug has no side effects, it will have no main effects either. If you want a side-effect-free drug, take a homeopathic remedy. They're just water.

Although I am an atheist, I have never wavered from my view that the New Testament is the best guide to living and I still enjoy reading it. Here is what the apostle Paul says about vegetarians: "For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth." (Romans 14: 2.3). What perfect advice! That is real tolerance: Very different from the dogmatism of the food freaks. Interesting that vegetarianism is such an old compulsion, though.

Even if we concede that getting fat shortens your life, what right has anybody got to question someone's decision to accept that tradeoff for themselves? Such a decision could be just one version of the old idea that it is best to have a short life but a merry one. Even the Bible is supportive of that thinking. See Ecclesiastes 8:15 and Isaiah 22: 13. To deny the right to make such a personal decision is plainly Fascistic.

Obesity does NOT causes diabetes. But insatiable eating is a prominent symptom of diabetes. So diabetes DOES cause obesity, which accounts for the correlation between the two things. The streets are full of fatties who don't have diabetes. How come? If conventional medical theory were correct we should be in the midst of an epidemic of diabetes. A recent high quality study has also found that fatties are LESS likely to die of diabetes

Elite people frequently express disapproval of red meat eating as a way of expressing their felt superiority to the ordinary people who eat it

IQ: Political correctness makes IQ generally unmentionable so it is rarely controlled for in epidemiological studies. This is extremely regrettable as it tends to vitiate findings that do not control for it. When it is examined, it is routinely found to have pervasive effects. We read, for instance, that "The mother's IQ was more highly predictive of breastfeeding status than were her race, education, age, poverty status, smoking, the home environment, or the child's birth weight or birth order". So political correctness can render otherwise interesting findings moot

"To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact" -- Charles Darwin

"Most men die of their remedies, not of their diseases", said Moliere. That may no longer be true in general but there is still a lot of false medical "wisdom" around that does harm to various degrees -- the statin and antioxidant fads, for instance. And showing its falsity is rarely the problem. The problem is getting people -- medical researchers in particular -- to abandon their preconceptions

Bertrand Russell could have been talking about today's conventional dietary "wisdom" when he said: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

The challenge, as John Maynard Keynes knew, "lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones".

"Obesity" is 77% genetic. So trying to make fatties slim is punishing them for the way they were born. That sort of thing is furiously condemned in relation to homosexuals so why is it OK for fatties?

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Some more problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize dietary fat. But Eskimos living on their traditional diet eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. At any given age they in fact have an exceptionally LOW incidence of cardiovascular disease. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

11). A major cause of increasing obesity is certainly the campaign against it -- as dieting usually makes people FATTER. If there were any sincerity to the obesity warriors, they would ban all diet advertising and otherwise shut up about it. Re-authorizing now-banned school playground activities and school outings would help too. But it is so much easier to blame obesity on the evil "multinationals" than it is to blame it on your own restrictions on the natural activities of kids

12. Fascism: "What we should be doing is monitoring children from birth so we can detect any deviations from the norm at an early stage and action can be taken". Who said that? Joe Stalin? Adolf Hitler? Orwell's "Big Brother"? The Spanish Inquisition? Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde? None of those. It was Dr Colin Waine, chairman of Britain's National Obesity Forum. What a fine fellow!

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Trans fats: For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The "antioxidant" religion: The experimental evidence is that antioxidants SHORTEN your life, if anything. Studies here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here, for instance. That they are of benefit is a great theory but it is one that has been coshed by reality plenty of times.

The medical consensus is often wrong. The best known wrongheaded medical orthodoxy is that stomach ulcers could not be caused by bacteria because the stomach is so acidic. Disproof of that view first appeared in 1875 (Yes. 1875) but the falsity of the view was not widely recognized until 1990. Only heroic efforts finally overturned the consensus and led to a cure for stomach ulcers. See
here and here and here.

Dieticians are just modern-day witch-doctors. There is no undergirding in double-blind studies for their usual recommendations

The fragility of current medical wisdom: Would you believe that even Old Testament wisdom can sometimes trump medical wisdom? Note this quote: "Spiess discussed Swedish research on cardiac patients that compared Jehovah's Witnesses who refused blood transfusions to patients with similar disease progression during open-heart surgery. The research found those who refused transfusions had noticeably better survival rates.

Medical wisdom can in fact fly in the face of the known facts. How often do we hear reverent praise for the Mediterranean diet? Yet both Australians and Japanese live longer than Greeks and Italians, despite having very different diets. The traditional Australian diet is in fact about as opposite to the Mediterranean diet as you can get. The reverence for the Mediterranean diet can only be understood therefore as some sort of Anglo-Saxon cultural cringe. It is quite brainless. Why are not the Australian and Japanese diets extolled if health is the matter at issue?

Since many of my posts here make severe criticisms of medical research, I should perhaps point out that I am also a severe critic of much research in my own field of psychology. See here and here

This is NOT an "alternative medicine" site. Perhaps the only (weak) excuse for the poorly substantiated claims that often appear in the medical literature is the even poorer level of substantiation offered in the "alternative" literature.

I used to teach social statistics in a major Australian university and I find medical statistics pretty obfuscatory. They seem uniformly designed to make mountains out of molehills. Many times in the academic literature I have excoriated my colleagues in psychology and sociology for going ga-ga over very weak correlations but what I find in the medical literature makes the findings in the social sciences look positively muscular. In fact, medical findings are almost never reported as correlations -- because to do so would exhibit how laughably trivial they generally are. If (say) 3 individuals in a thousand in a control group had some sort of an adverse outcome versus 4 out of a thousand in a group undergoing some treatment, the difference will be published in the medical literature with great excitement and intimations of its importance. In fact, of course, such small differences are almost certainly random noise and are in any rational calculus unimportant. And statistical significance is little help in determining the importance of a finding. Statistical significance simply tells you that the result was unlikely to be an effect of small sample size. But a statistically significant difference could have been due to any number of other randomly-present factors.

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

The Truth About Ancel Keys. Keys was a brilliant man but his concentration on heart disease misled him. He was right that high fat intake predicted high rates of heart disease (though it was ANIMAL fat in particular that was the "culprit") but he overlooked that the same intake predicted LESS mortality from other causes. The same narrow vision led him to be the earliest prominent advocate of the "Mediterranean diet" hypothesis. It's true that Mediterraneans have less heart disease but they have more of other causes of death, so that Mediterranean countries do not have particularly long lifespans when compared with other developed countries. If there are any lessons about diet to be learned from lifespans, it is un-Mediterranean countries like Australia and the Nordic countries that one should look to.

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) could have been speaking of the prevailing health "wisdom" of today when he said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

Improbable events do happen at random -- as mathematician John Brignell notes rather tartly: "Consider, instead, my experiences in the village pub swindle. It is based on the weekly bonus ball in the National Lottery. It so happens that my birth date is 13, so that is the number I always choose. With a few occasional absences abroad I have paid my pound every week for a year and a half, but have never won. Some of my neighbours win frequently; one in three consecutive weeks. Furthermore, I always put in a pound for my wife for her birth date, which is 11. She has never won either. The probability of neither of these numbers coming up in that period is less than 5%, which for an epidemiologist is significant enough to publish a paper.

Kids are not shy anymore. They are "autistic". Autism is a real problem but the rise in its incidence seems likely to be the product of overdiagnosis -- the now common tendency to medicalize almost all problems.

One of the great pleasures in life is the first mouthful of cold beer on a hot day -- and the food Puritans can stick that wherever they like

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